REMOTE PROCEDURE CALLS EE324

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Godfrey Henderson
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1 REMOTE PROCEDURE CALLS EE324

2 Administrivia Course feedback Midterm plan Reading material/textbook/slides are updated. Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective, by Bryant and O'Hallaron Some reading material (URL) in the slides. (lecture 9)

3 Building up to today Abstractions for communication Internetworking protocol: IP TCP masks some of the pain of communicating across unreliable IP Abstractions for computation and I/O Process: A resource container for execution on a single machine Thread: pthread and synchronization primitives (sem, mutex, cv) File

4 Now back to Distributed Systems: remember? 4 A distributed system is: A collection of independent computers that appears to its users as a sin gle coherent system "A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable." Leslie La mport

5 Distributed Systems 5 The middleware layer extends over multiple machine s, and offers each application the same interface.

6 What does it do? 6 Hide complexity to programmers/users Hide the fact that its processes and resources are physically distributed across multiple machines. Transparency in a Distributed System

7 How? 7 The middleware layer extends over multiple machine s, and offers each application the same interface.

8 Starter for Today Splitting computation across the network What programming abstractions work well to split work among multiple networked computers?

9 Many ways Request-reply protocols Remote procedure calls (RPC) Remote method invocation (RMI) Recommended reading : Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design 5 th edition, by Coulouris, et al. (CDK5) chapter 5

10 Request-reply protocols Client Hey, do something Server working { Done/Result

11 Request-reply protocols eg, your PA1 (binary protocol) struct foomsg { u_int32_t len; } send_foo(char *contents) { int msglen = sizeof(struct foomsg) + strlen(contents); char buf = malloc(msglen); struct foomsg *fm = (struct foomsg *)buf; fm->len = htonl(strlen(contents)); memcpy(buf + sizeof(struct foomsg), contents, strlen(contents)); write(outsock, buf, msglen); } Then wait for response, handle timeout, etc.

12 Request-reply protocols: text protocol HTTP See the HTTP/1.1 standard: Done with your PA2 yet?

13 Remote Procedure Call (RPC) A type of client/server communication Attempts to make remote procedure calls look like local ones figure from Microsoft MSDN {... foo() } void foo() { invoke_remote_foo() }

14 RPC Goals Ease of programming Hide complexity Automate a lot of task of implementing Familiar model for programmers (just make a function call) Historical note: Seems obvious in retrospect, but RPC was only invented in the 80s. See Birrell & Nelson, Implementing Remote Procedure Call... or Bruce Nelson, Ph.D. Thesis, Carnegie Mellon University: Remote Procedure Call., 1981 :)

15 Remote procedure call 15 A remote procedure call makes a call to a remote service look like a l ocal call RPC makes transparent whether server is local or remote RPC allows applications to become distributed transparently RPC makes architecture of remote machine transparent

16 RPC 16 The interaction between client and server in a traditional RPC.

17 Passing Value Parameters (1) 17 The steps involved in a doing a remote computation through RPC.

18 But it s not always simple Calling and called procedures run on different machines, with different address spaces And perhaps different environments.. or operating systems.. Must convert to local representation of data Machines and network can fail

19 Marshaling and Unmarshaling (From example) hotnl() -- host to network-byte-order, long. network-byte-order (big-endian) standardized to deal with cross-platform variance Note how we arbitrarily decided to send the string by sending its length followed by L bytes of the string? That s marshalling, too. Floating point... Nested structures? (Design question for the RPC system - do you support them?) Complex datastructures? (Some RPC systems let you send lists and maps as firstorder objects)

20 stubs and IDLs RPC stubs do the work of marshaling and unmarshaling data But how do they know how to do it? Typically: Write a description of the function signature using an IDL -- interface definition language. Lots of these. Some look like C, some look like XML,... details don t matter much.

21 SunRPC Venerable, widely-used RPC system Defines XDR ( external Data Representation ) -- C-like language for describing functions -- and provides a compiler that creates stubs struct fooargs { string msg<255>; int baz; }

22 And describes functions program FOOPROG { version VERSION { void FOO(fooargs) = 1; void BAR(barargs) = 2; } = 1; } = 9999;

23 More requirements Provide reliable transmission (or indicate failure) May have a runtime that handles this Authentication, encryption, etc. Nice when you can add encryption to your system by changing a few lines in your IDL file (it s never really that simple, of course -- identity/key management)

24 RPC vs. LPC 24 Memory access Partial failures Latency

25 But it s not always simple Properties of distributed computing that make achieving transparency difficult: Calling and called procedures run on different machines, with different address spaces Machines and network can fail Latency

26 Passing Reference Parameters 26 Replace with pass by copy/restore Need to know size of data to copy Difficult in some programming languages Solves the problem only partially What about data structures containing pointers? Access to memory in general?

27 Partial failures 27 In local computing: if machine fails, application fails In distributed computing: if a machine fails, part of application fails one cannot tell the difference between a machine failure and network failure How to make partial failures transparent to client?

28 RPC failures Request from cli -> srv lost Reply from srv -> cli lost Server crashes after receiving request Client crashes after sending request

29 Strawman solution 29 Make remote behavior identical to local behavior: Every partial failure results in complete failure You abort and reboot the whole system You wait patiently until system is repaired Problems with this solution: Many catastrophic failures Clients block for long periods System might not be able to recover

30 Real solution: break transparency 30 Possible semantics for RPC: Exactly-once Impossible in practice At least once: Only for idempotent operations At most once Zero, don t know, or once Zero or once Transactional semantics At-most-once most practical But different from LPC

31 RPC semantics: Exactly-Once? Sorry - no can do in general. Imagine that message triggers an external physical thing (say, a robot fires a missle) The robot could crash immediately before or after firing and lose its state. Don t know which one happened. Can, however, make this window very small.

32 RPC semantics At-least-once semantics Keep retrying... At-most-once Use a sequence # to ensure idempotency against network retransmissions and remember it at the server

33 Implementing at-most-once At-least-once: Just keep retrying on client side until you get a response. Server just processes requests as normal, doesn t remember anything. Simple! At-most-once: Server might get same request twice... Must re-send previous reply and not process request (implies: keep cache of handled requests/responses) Must be able to identify requests Strawman: remember all RPC IDs handled. -> Ugh! Requires infinite memory. Real: Keep sliding window of valid RPC IDs, have client number them sequentially.

34 Summary: 34 expose remoteness to client Expose RPC properties to client, since you cannot hide them Application writers have to decide how to deal with partial failures Consider: E-commerce application vs. game

35 35 RPC implementation issues

36 RPC implementation 36 Stub compiler Generates stubs for client and server Language dependent Compile into machine-independent format E.g., XDR Format describes types and values RPC protocol RPC transport

37 Writing a Client and a Server (1) 37 The steps in writing a client and a server in DCE RPC.

38 Writing a Client and a Server (2) 38 Three files output by the IDL compiler: A header file (e.g., interface.h, in C terms). The client stub. The server stub.

39 RPC protocol 39 Guarantee at-most-once semantics by tagging requests and response wit h a nonce RPC request header: Request nonce Service Identifier Call identifier Protocol: Client resends after time out Server maintains table of nonces and replies

40 RPC transport 40 Use reliable transport layer Flow control Congestion control Reliable message transfer Combine RPC and transport protocol Reduce number of messages RPC response can also function as acknowledgement for message transport protocol

41 Performance As a general library, performance is often a big concern for RPC systems Major source of overhead: copies and marshaling/unmarshaling overhead Zero-copy tricks: Representation: Send on the wire in native format and indicate that format with a bit/byte beforehand. What does this do? Think about sending uint32 between two little-endian machines Scatter-gather writes (writev() and friends)

42 Complex / Pointer Data Structures Very few low-level RPC systems support C is messy about things like that -- can t always understand the structure and know where to stop chasing Java RMI (and many other higher-level languages) allows sending objects as part of an RPC But be careful - don t want to send megabytes of data across network to ask simple question!

43 Important Lessons 43 Procedure calls Simple way to pass control and data Elegant transparent way to distribute application Not only way Hard to provide true transparency Failures Performance Memory access Etc. How to deal with hard problem give up and let programmer deal with it Worse is better

Administrivia. Remote Procedure Calls. Reminder about last time. Building up to today

Administrivia. Remote Procedure Calls. Reminder about last time. Building up to today Remote Procedure Calls Carnegie Mellon University 15-440 Distributed Systems Administrivia Readings are now listed on the syllabus See.announce post for some details The book covers a ton of material pretty